Chiefs at a frozen food factory on Tyneside are planning to axe scores of workers just before Christmas.

Chiefs at a frozen food factory on Tyneside are planning to axe scores of workers just before Christmas.

Staff at the Findus factory have been told 90 of them will go at the end of the year.

Eight hundred people work at the plant, at Longbenton, in North Tyneside. It was bought by the Swedish investment company, EQT, from Nestle, 18 months ago.

One worker said: "We are not very happy about it at all. I have a wife and kids and it is going to hit hard if I am made redundant.

"I think EQT has behaved disgracefully. When they came in here they promised our jobs would be safe."

A spokeswoman for Findus said while the plan was to turn the Longbenton plant into a centre of excellence for pancake based products other lines would be moved from the Tyneside plant to other factories in Europe.

She said: "It will mean a job loss from the end of the year of 90 workers.We will look at voluntary redundancies to begin with.

"We have been going through a consultation process about developing Longbenton as a centre of excellence for pancakes.

"It will mean bringing in a production line for these products and meanwhile transferring Recipe Dish lines to centres of excellence in Europe.

"In the short term we will be producing a new Recipe Dish product range at Longbenton."

EQT owns 14 Findus factories, which employ more than 3,000 people across Europe. Long-benton is its only UK plant. When EQT took over the plant in October 1999 there was optimism for the future.

Martin Gannon of the GMB Union said: "At the start of this year the company began consultations with the workforce about 100 possible redundancies and that has now been reduced to 90 as a worse case scenario.

"The company are prepared to work with the trade unions to aim to reduce the figure so there are no compulsory redundancies on the site but at present there will be 90 less people around at the end of the year. That could be through retirement and voluntary redundancy."